Carpet tile is normally manufactured by producing a long web of tile material and then cutting square tiles from the web. Identical tiles installed side-by-side provide an attractive, but sometimes uninteresting, carpeted floor surface. As a result, enormous effort has been expended to produce patterned tiles having variations in pile, color and other properties for aesthetic reasons. Dissimilar tiles have sometimes been installed in a checkerboard or other pattern, and dissimilar tiles have sometimes been cut up and then reassembled, as suggested. for instance, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,324,562 for “Multiple segment carpet tile and methods and apparatus for production of such tile.”
Such prior efforts are either very limited in effectiveness or, as is the case with respect to U.S. Pat. No. 5,324,562, are labor intensive and expensive to practice.